


Old Friend

by dysfunctionalfuckfest



Category: Tegan and Sara (Band)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-27
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-15 12:32:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3447323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dysfunctionalfuckfest/pseuds/dysfunctionalfuckfest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>AU in which the twins were separated at birth.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Old Friend

**Author's Note:**

> AU in which the twins were separated at birth.

She's waiting for the SkyTrain at Waterfront, headphones on at a shameful volume that would surely upset any old-aged passer-by, hands erratic while marking the rhythm of the music she's listening to over her thighs, frantic white little nail-clipped fingers dancing out from her black fingerless gloves. _Good morning, heartache_. The train should be here in about two minutes.

She isn't in a hurry – she should be, there's a job interview waiting for her and Tegan is supposed to go to in about thirty minutes, but if she's being honest with herself (and she is), she'd much rather just keep living in Gastown (despite it all) and playing guitar in little coffee shops for little audiences (of course she'd like them to be larger but not everything's gonna be perfect, is it?) and annoying her mother for an allowance (never mind that she's thirty-four already, unabashedly so), anything's better than getting some dumb regular job she had applied to this time; she was never too good at keeping work, nothing could hold her long enough; to Sonia's despair, Tegan could sit inside her house and strum at the guitar for hours on end, she could lose sleep over it, and yet couldn't be bothered to stay a whole week anywhere, whether it was waitressing or babysitting or anything at fucking all, really. All Tegan wanted to do was music, listen to music, play music, _music_. But, as with most people, her dream hadn't come true and she was doomed to searching for something that would make that void if not disappear, then hurt less; her dream was doomed to a purely theoretical existence in the numerous music sheets scattered around her home, lying on the floor here, crumpled and forgotten in the space between her bed and the wall there.

Tegan's a dreamer, though. There she was, lightly banging her head to some Rancid song she'd rediscovered from her youth collection, dreaming she was on stage like Tim Armstrong, energetic and alive. Her eyes aren't focusing anywhere. If anything, she's looking within, imagining herself with a faux hawk or some other equally interesting hairdo, shredding and singing to a packed house – oblivious to the people gathering behind her or on the other side of the station, waiting to board the train headed for the opposite direction she had to go. She lets her gaze hop and wander about the many faces of Vancouver fauna, hiding their balding heads in worn black beanies or their figures inside their thick, large coats. They're all the same, they're all different. And yet –

What the fuck?!

The music pounding in her ears fades to nothing when her eyes fall upon a particular face on the other side: a woman, small as herself, a woman just arrived to the platform, standing directly in front of her, albeit on the other side; a woman whose face is her own in every way, a mirror. She doesn't look back at Tegan, her eyes downcast, alternating between her all too large boots and the tracks as she waits without taking up any much space, and meanwhile Tegan's heart is at full speed, her legs about to fail her any second now. The woman is _exactly_ like her, even their short haircuts and clothes are similar if not equally identical. It's terrifying, really, but something inside Tegan clicks; she had never felt this, whatever it was that made her feel like a balloon in the process of being filled with hot breath, this pull – she has to control herself not to move forward and reach out so she can touch this woman, at the expense of falling on the tracks and losing her life since the train is coming, both of them are. She can hear them better than the song still playing in her head, their rumbling masterfully synchronized; _twins_ , coming to greet one another. She hears them, senses them coming, but never sees them, her eyes are fixed.

She wants to shout, to leap, to do something, _anything_ , because the woman never fucking once looks back at her even if Tegan's skin is burning all over, remembering where the woman's skin touched her...! She won't be able to live with herself, Tegan, if that woman doesn't look back –

“Hey!” she cries out in utter despair, afraid that the air dislocated in her tiny, meaningless speech might cause the woman to evaporate before her eyes, like smoke, but she doesn't – she hears the scream, she looks up (everybody else looks at Tegan too, curious), and in the second it takes before the trains cross one another and cut off their contact, their eyes meet.

Tegan can't move. Fuck that job interview, fuck everything else, fuck even her own stupid love songs because she realizes now she has never known love – whoever this woman is (and she knows who she is), Tegan knows she loves her; maybe her mind doesn't know it objectively, but her heart, her whole body can't lie, the goosebumps all over, the anxiety firing up her organs inside her, _they know_. It's not love at first sight, that would be ridiculous (as much as Tegan professes to believe in the stuff); this isn't the first time they've met. She's sure of it, her body knows, her blood knows.

So she doesn't move. She will wait. The woman on the other platform will, too, she knows it, she just knows it. They have to look one another in the (same) face again.

That woman is her sister.

No one has ever told her anything about a possible sister, no one has ever even joked about her being anything but an only daughter, not even those silly “evil twin” jokes kids play when they behave badly, there has never been any of it – and yet the woman on the other platform is her _sister_. Tegan knows this as much as she knows herself. She knows.

The doors on both trains close and the two metal monsters are brought to life again, with new people in their interiors; both trains begin to move out the platform, slowly at first, picking up speed as they go. The moment they leave entirely, the moment she can see the other side again will reveal to her once more the woman that shared a womb with her, whose existence has been kept a secret all this time. And she knows she hasn't felt this all by herself, this anguish; every heartbeat hammering at her ribcage has echoed within that other woman too, every single one at the very same time. She knows it.

The trains disappear into their respective tracks, life goes on. On the other side – there is nothing. New faces sprout from the very ground, but there is nothing. Tim Armstrong is still verbalizing translations of her teenage emotion in her eardrums, but there is nothing. Her interview is definitely blown by now, nothing, her body is empty, her soul departed – her body might not have stepped on that last train, but her spirit has, along with that woman. Maybe she'll just run back home under the rain (Vancouver being Vancouver), past some crackheads, climb up the stairs to the minuscule dumpster she calls a home whose rent is always late, and set fire to her old guitar and all her sad, pathetic, ignorant songs along with it since there is nothing.

But when she regains some fraction of control over herself and finally turns to leave, back into her solitary, dim world, determined to lock herself away at her place to rot (and labour obsessively away on her bad internet and dial up her mother's phone and fucking interrogate her until she could find some scrap of information on the twin sister she now knew she had, losing days, nights and health, whatever it took, to unravel the reason for the cruelty that was their separation), she's paralysed again. She almost loses balance and falls backwards on the tracks as the woman approaches her in uneasy, shy steps, having herself changed platforms and come to her. She had not left.

She knew.

“W-what's your name?” Tegan asks as she also tiptoes closer. They're both clearly apprehensive, on the edge; there are no right words, there are no words. How can anyone be prepared for this?

“Sara. My name is Sara,” Sara says with a lisp heavy enough to make Tegan struggle to make out her words. “What's yours?”

“I'm Tegan.”

And when they stand before one another for the first time and exchange names, they do not stand petrified. They don't engage in small talk, they don't ask any of the obvious, necessary, flaming questions poisoning their tongues, just letting their eyes take in every detail, register every trait they share, confused but in awe. Their following vehicle of communication comes on impulse, but it's the most natural thing to do, it's the thing they need the most, and they embrace, fitting as perfectly as they had once before, some thirty four broken years past. Their grip tightens, their eyes, witnesses, bringers of joy, see nothing more, full of the tears they owe one another.

When the next train arrives at the station and its passengers step out, they'll walk by that strange and sacred reunion and wonder for a split second about that, those two women trapped in one another's arms, sharing heat and tears, before leaving that behind to worry about their own job and bosses and deadlines, their husbands and wives, progeny and siblings, life and death.

And when the station empties out, there is nothing – they have taken away with them their everything, shoulder to shoulder with the rest. And life goes on.

 


End file.
